In Berlin, crowds are queuing to see an exhibition featuring 200 dead bodies. The models sit, ride, run, play chess and they cause a huge stir. So if you haven't already heard of Professor Gunther von Hagens's collection, then you'll be able to judge for yourself early next year when Korperwelten or Body Worlds comes to London.

Since the show opened in Austria in 1997 six million people have seen it, and that figure rises by 50,000 every week. The 'anatomy as art' debate has drawn in leading Austrian and German theologians, politicians, art historians, philosophers and most recently the Russian authorities, as Germany's FAKT magazine traced the bodies of the bodies of 56 Siberian peasants and mental patients from Novosibirsk to von Hagens's collection.

The alarm was raised when 'Cyrillic characters' were identified on the skin of one body at the show (which claims to use only donated specimens) in Vienna in 1999, pointing, the magazine claimed, towards 'a former prison camp inmate'. Von Hagens, 57, went on German TV to refute the main claim that the bodies appear in the show. There was no denying their presence at his Institute fur Plastination in Heidelberg, however, and the horror expressed by the citizens of Novosibirsk when they found out what had happened to their compatriots, shows just how deep emotions run when it comes to the appropriation of our bodies after death and any violation of 'human dignity'.

Without visiting this extraordinary circus of plastic dead people, it's hard to understand why such a grim concept could be so popular. Von Hagens has spent a quarter of a century perfecting the plastination technique which he developed in 1977 at the Heidelberg Institute of Anatomy. In a complicated and gory process which takes years, the specimen is preserved in formaldehyde, frozen, thawed, then dissected and body fluids are extracted and replaced with special colour-matched plastics. The result is a specimen which is anatomically perfect and identical, except the new necro-body can be bent and stretched like a Barbie doll.

When people first visit the show they have a problem believing the specimens are real because they are stripped of their skin (and identity), sanitised and 'odourless'. My first overwhelming impression, however, was that it was all too real. Designed to ease people in slowly, the show starts with diseased organs of medical interest and intricate displays of the arterial system suspended in liquid and builds up gradually to whole specimens. By their third corpse, people are feeling bolder, peering right into the exquisitely designed bundles of nerves, sinews and muscles peeled back to reveal a spinal injury, or a hip replacement - even touching them.

Disgust soon gives way to fascination: a group of teenagers queue up to get a chance to hold a real city dweller's lung, mottled with black spots, or feel the gallstones of a middle-aged liver.
Like a sculptor, the plastinator needs to have the finished pose in his mind before starting work. Von Hagens based his Runner, where the muscles have been splayed out aerodynamically like a fan, on Italian futurist Boccioni's Prototypes of Movement in Space. The Open Drawer model, where the body is prised open in chunks, is based on Anthropomorphic Cupboard by Dali; the Muscle Man, with his skin draped over his arm is based on Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel; the chess player, bent over the board, brain exposed deep in concentration, on a Cézanne.

Can this be called art? Some pieces, like the newest addition, Horse and Rider, which looks like it has leapt straight out of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, work brilliantly. Man and beast, stripped of skin and fur merge as a single being. Man is portrayed as animal but nonetheless the greatest of them, holding the horse's brain, tiny in proportion to its body, in one hand and whipping him on with the other. Another piece, a pregnant woman presented reclining in an Ingres-like posture, with stomach open to reveal a five- month-old foetus, seriously pushes the bounds of taste.

Meeting von Hagens (who is in Berlin on a flying visit before returning to his institute in Dalian, China, where he now lives) is something akin to meeting Hannibal Lecter. In fact he has a lot in common with the cannibalistic polymath: a finely tuned appreciation of Renaissance art, opera, philosophy and a passion for flaying dead bodies and being elbow deep in gore. Pictures of him show a bloodless, dour face, shadowed by a Joseph Beuys style hat, but in the flesh von Hagens is surprisingly uncreepy. He has an honest, open face (he smiles, a lot!), a conscientious manner (he answers every question directly, perhaps with too much graphic detail) and yet there is something about those hands (definitely the hands of a sculptor) and the way you wonder if he's sizing you up for dissection. (After the interview he tells me that should I choose to become a donor, he would turn me into a splendid singer with arms outstretched.)

'What I do is not art, nor is it science,' he says. 'It reaches into artistry but the effect goes beyond education because feelings and emotions are involved.' A wise decision, considering one of the main objections to Body Worlds, first made by the Dean of Mannheim (who nearly succeeded in preventing its opening in Austria in1997), is that it violates the sanctity of the human body for the purposes of commercial art. Von Hagens prefers the title 'inventor'.
While many would put him in the same category as Anthony-Noel Kelly (the British artist jailed in 1998 for stealing body parts and a big fan of Mr Plastinator) or grave robber Ed Gein (the model for Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, who used to fashion furniture and clothes from the bones and skin of female cadavers), he sees himself as fitting into the ancient tradition of anatomy.

He quotes as his inspirations the ancient Greek Herophilos, who first opened up the science to investigate Plato's theory of the duality of the body and soul and the Renaissance greats Leonardo da Vinci and Vesalius, both obsessed with the interior of the body. As for that hat, which never leaves his head, it is most likely a reference to Frans Hals's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp (the physician wears a similar one), his favourite painting.

Born in East Germany 'of peasant stock', he left school at 16 and later spent two years in prison, for attempting unsuccessfully to escape to the West. On his release he put himself through night school by working as an elevator operator and managed to get himself accepted by the Heidelberg Institute of Anatomy in Austria.

It was there in 1977 that he started his research into plastination for scientific purposes, but von Hagens soon found that 'laymen were interested in the specimens because they could see death without the burden of cruelty - it was made palatable'.

The success of the first show in Tokyo (2.5 million visitors) in 1995, funded by the sale of plastinates to medical institutions, was a vindication for 15 years of hard work. 'I had many people coming up and thanking me,' he says, 'it was a revelation for them.' But it was feedback from the Japanese, who found the poses too 'medical', that drove him to Italy to study Renaissance anatomical books.

Von Hagens sees his life's work as a 'socio-political revolution, in the way I am bringing anatomy again to the people. Except for the short period of the Renaissance when anatomy was studied widely and available to artists, intellectuals and medical students, the interior of the body has always been connected with horror and gruesome effects - it is Hitchcock, it is Frankenstein, or the movie industry obsessed with killing. At Korperwelten the gap between life and death is narrowed.'

On the subject of Novosibirsk, he almost loses his composure. 'There was not a shred of truth in the allegations!' he insists. The tattooed corpse in question was a German citizen and a personal friend; the contract with the Anatomical Institute of the University of Novosibirsk, who are licensed to collect unclaimed bodies, was 'entirely legal' and the specimens arrived in October 1999 'ruling out' the possibility they were used in the show, since they take two years to mummify.

The Church's disapproval of Body Worlds, shows, he suggests, how out of touch it is with modern thinking. His body donation programme which is apparently receiving five new bequests a day, appeals largely to young people and the list stands at 3,600 living donors and 115 dead. For many he explains, plastination is a secularised form of burial. 'It eliminates anxiety because I am able to extend my physical existence after death.'

Personally, he is agnostic but he believes in the soul. 'I don't know whether we continue or not after life, but this exhibition gets much closer to the soul than the Church because you are so close to the body.I don't fear death any more.'

Korperwelten in Berlin is extended until 2 September, open daily, 8am to midnight (last admission); and at Caves des Cureghem, Brussels from 22 September

About this article

Skinless wonders...

This article appeared in the Observer
on Saturday 19 May 2001.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 14.33 EDT on Sunday 20 May 2001.
It was last modified at 14.33 EDT on Friday 25 May 2001.
It was first published at 14.33 EDT on Friday 25 May 2001.